Stripping Wainscotting

After my last post I received many comments about the wainscotting in the bathroom. I had asked whether I should leave it “as is” with the peeling paint or strip it and paint over it. Some of you mentioned that fact that this flaking paint is probably lead paint. We do have a youngster in the house so I agree that it makes sense to strip the old paint off and paint over it.

I hauled out my trusty Silent Paint Remover machine and got to work. Some of you may remember that years ago I wrote about the various stripping methods that I’ve tried and which ones I found to be successful (that was one of my best posts ever). I rarely promote products but I’m telling you this machine (the Silent Paint Remover) really works and has saved me hours and hours of messy stripping. This machine is not a quick fix by any means, you will still be working hard and because you are heating the paint until it bubbles there is the risk of actually burning the wood. But once you get your rhythm down it’s easy to use. Nothing beats it if you’re stipping floors or non-intricate surfaces.

So here’s how the process went. This is how it looked before being stripped or painted. I thought it looked good but wasn’t thinking about the possibility of this being flaky lead paint.

See how it was really flaking?

So I hauled out the Silent Paint Remover and started stripping off the old paint.

Here’s the stripper at work. You hold it against the paint for about one minute and then the paint bubbles up and then just scrape the paint off the wainscotting.

And after about 1 hour I got more than half of the paint stripped off. I swept up the dried paint curls and tossed them in the trash. No gloppy stripper, no worries about rags ingiting spontaneously, no wiping up a mess.

Outtakes:

Took my kid to NYC for the long weekend and we found some great repurposing going on:

There is a park in NYC called Hi-line which is made from an unused subway line (or section of it anyway). The views from this park are amazing and what a great use of some old train tracks.

This park is mostly wild flowers and grasses but has some nice seating areas and you can walk for days on this.

You can actually walk under this building on the old train tacks.

We also found a Home Depot that was inside an old historic building. Great use of the space.

And lastly, I think this place just used some old neon signs to decorate their establishment. But don’t you just want to go inside for a cold drink?